He loved too well the sweet intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies of Milton.

These made him impatient of the simpler strains of Gifted Hopkins.
Though he himself never wrote verses, he had some qualities which his friend the poet may have undervalued in comparison with the talent of modelling the symmetries of verse and adjusting the correspondences of rhyme.

He had kept in a singular degree all the sensibilities of childhood, its simplicity, its reverence.

It seemed as if nothing of all that he met in his daily life was common or unclean to him, for there was no mordant in his nature for what was coarse or vile, and all else he could not help idealizing into its own conception of itself, so to speak.

He loved the leaf after its kind as well as the flower, and the root as well as the leaf, and did not exhaust his capacity of affection or admiration on the blossom or bud upon which his friend the poet lavished the wealth of his verse.